In MAKE 03 we showed you how to make a VCR into a cat feeder, here’s MSN’s article about the project and the decline of VHS – “Don’t tell English inventor James Larsson that a VCR is useless. He’s got an idea what to do with that aging video gear–turn it into an automatic cat feeder, using the VCR’s timer to dispense food on a regular schedule.” Link.
We’ve covered some of the LEGO software, but it’s always worth another looksie, it appears LEGO has added more resources for designing your own LEGO bot – JBB writes “Lego factory A boon to lego robot builders, the lego factory lets you build a virtual model of your unique lego structure and order those blocks as a custom set. Add your robot’s sensors and other such items, and you’ve got a beautiful custom robot.” Link.
Tom writes “Inventgeek.com has a great article on rescuing your LCD monitors from the dumpster. Those of us that have used LCD monitors for a while know that over time the backlight starts to dim and can eventually completely fail. Well for less than $20.00 and about a half hour of your time you can replace the backlight and rejuvenate that monitor to as good as new condition. Now if they can only come up with a way to do this with my old Plasma TV tube.” Link.
This just launched today – “OpenSource.nokia.com is the first place to look for information concerning Nokia involvement in the Open Source community. The Projects link will take you to project descriptions and give you access to any Nokia developed downloadable code with an Open Source license.” They’ve got an NNTP news reader up there (source is on Sourceforge), and a few more things (Python, a SIP user agent library, and more). A web browser is coming soon (based on Apple’s Webkit). Also, “Series 60” has been rebranded as “S60”. Thanks Brian! Link.
Greg writes “Have you ever been playing an xbox game, and feel the rumble in your hands, and think to yourself, “It sure would be cool to have a rumble pack in a mouse”. My friend thought this, and he proceeded to make the very first Rumble Mouse…” Greg made a USB version, here’s how he did it – Link.
Sven writes “About a year ago, inspired by other projects like Afrotech’s Hard-disk Sound System, I built a first version of my harddisk speaker. The first one was just a very quick hack to see if it would work and was destroyed due to too much power melting the coils and cables. We hooked it up to a 50W guitar amp and pushed the volume a bit to far… Since it sounded really great, I decided to build a second one.” Link.
“It’s nice to have a bit of colour in your house for style reasons, so here are some neat little PCB’s that accommodate a mixture of red, green and blue LEDs giving you the option of controlling the colour they emit. They are designed to fit into standard MR16 downlighter frames for convenience of mounting. Since this page was put up the intensity of common LEDs has risen dramatically and the matching controller project now has extremely sophisticated software that really makes these lights shine.” Thanks Rick! Link.
